Not Watching The Guardian’s Beauty Tutorials By Sali Hughes? You Should Be!

Little known fact about me: I lovemakeup. Love. It. I love playing with the colors and the textures and different brushes and learning what products do what. I don’t wear makeup every single day, because I actually don’t especially care about how I look. But I still have baskets and drawers and makeup bags rivaling whatever frightshow Katy Perry’s got going on in her closet and it’s one of the joys of my life.

When I noticed a series of videos on the UK Guardian‘s web site called “beauty tips,” I had to click on them. The Guardian is one of those smarty-pants papers that Americans mention reading when they want to sound intellectual; any video about lip gloss or false eyelashes on the Guardian‘s web site, I had to see. So a few weeks ago, when I was laid out in bed with a Beastly Virus From Hell, I watched one.

And then I watched all of them …

The narrator of the Guardian‘s beauty tips videos (and its accompanying column) is a woman named Sali Hughes. I have no idea who Sali is, but I feel like we are close chums — former roommates, perhaps? — now that I have intimate knowledge of her toilette, like her favorite men’s fragrances and her love of autumnal makeup shades. It doesn’t hurt that she is a dead ringer for the actress Emily Mortimer. And it especially doesn’t hurt that she occasionally uses cute British slang that I have to Google.

When Sali Hughes talks to the camera about makeup, skincare, and hair products, her intonation is imbued with the utmost seriousness. Take the words away — and the lipstick in her hand — and she might be talking about the Gaza Strip, so serious is she. That is what I love most about Sali: she’s serious about makeup. Too much beauty writing, and especially beauty blogging, is all about multiple exclamation points (!!!) and non-word words like “gorge!” and “fab!” I don’t especially feel like a grown-up lady when the beauty how-tos I am reading sound like they were written by a 15-year-old.

Sali’s beauty how-to videos, which run about 10 to 12 minutes each, might be the most boring thing in the world for you. But I, personally, learn something in almost every single video. For instance, I had no idea one is supposed to put on foundation first and then cover spots with concealer. I’ve been doing it the other way around for over a decade.

Comments

Simply Irresistible

Over the years, we've poked fun at a lot of "based on a true story" movies that turned out to be bullshit. But then we thought that maybe we should stop giving Hollywood shit for embellishing history a bit if it lets them tell a slightly better story. So instead, we decided to give Hollywood…

As you slog your way through the myriad not-yet-April Fools' Day pranks that plague this nation, revel in this: no one has ever pranked someone better than Michael Jackson pranked Russell Crowe, and he did it for years. In an interview with The Guardian, Crowe revealed that despite having never met Jackson,…